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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SpikeTAD: Spiking Neural Networks for End-to-End Temporal Action Detection

Video understanding is a crucial part of computer vision, with numerous application scenarios. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, an increasing number of efforts are trying to deploy video understanding models on them. However, existing video understanding models are difficult to deploy due to their large size and prohibitive power consumption. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown bioplausibility and low power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), especially on neuromorphic chips which are regarded as essential components of future mobile devices. However, excessively long conversion time-steps and severe performance degradation problems limit their application. To solve the problems above, we explore the application of SNNs on temporal action detection (TAD), which is an important task in video understanding, and propose the first SNN-based end-to-end TAD architecture coined as SpikeTAD. While maintaining extremely low power consumption, SpikeTAD achieves an average mAP of 67.2% in THUMOS14 and 37.42% in ActivityNet-1.3, demonstrating the feasibility of a low-power TAD model. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SpikeTAD.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Propagating Structural Guidance: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images and Sparse OCT Scans

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes–the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/while-plus/OCT-guide-FFA-Syn.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

On-Demand Coherent Mapping of Telecom Optical States onto Erbium Hyperfine Spins

arXiv:2606.15009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical quantum memories operating directly at telecom wavelengths are a key enabling technology for long-distance quantum networks, yet on-demand storage onto long-lived ground-state spins in this spectral region has remained elusive due to the challenge of coherently transferring optical excitations to hyperfine spin states. Here we demonstrate spin-wave storage in $^{167}$Er$^{3+}$:Y$_2$SiO$_5$ at 0.8 K and 1.1 T, establishing the core operational primitive required for on-demand telecom quantum memories. Using classical optical control pulses, we coherently transfer collective optical excitations to erbium hyperfine states with transfer efficiency exceeding 12%, enabling on-demand retrieval. We measure a hyperfine population lifetime of 25 s and demonstrate spin-wave storage for up to 25 $\mu$s. By identifying hyperfine inhomogeneous broadening as the dominant present limitation, our measurements define a clear pathway toward second-scale storage through improved spectral tailoring and dynamical decoupling. The results highlight the application of erbium-based solid-state memories for scalable fiber-compatible quantum repeater architectures.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Family-Aware Residual Architecture for Predicting Quantum Circuit Simulation Performance

arXiv:2606.11620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Approximate tensor-network simulators enable classical simulation of quantum circuits beyond the reach of exact methods, but selecting optimal approximation parameters – such as bond dimension thresholds – remains a costly trial-and-error process. We present a family-aware neural architecture that predicts both the minimum approximation threshold required to achieve target fidelity and the expected wall-clock runtime for quantum circuit simulation, given only the circuit's OpenQASM description and execution context. Our key insight is that quantum circuits from different algorithmic families (e.g., QFT, Grover, VQE) exhibit fundamentally distinct simulation cost profiles due to their differing entanglement structures. We employ family-conditioned residual corrections – additive, family-specific adjustments atop a shared backbone, drawing on established conditional computation techniques – enabling the model to capture both universal circuit properties and algorithmic nuances. The architecture incorporates a pretrained family classifier (97.5% accuracy) and domain-informed algorithm fingerprint features derived from gate-composition heuristics. Evaluated on circuits spanning 7–130 qubits across 10 algorithm families, our system achieves 79.5% exact threshold accuracy (91.2% within one rung) and $R^2 = 0.82$ runtime correlation, with inference completing in approximately 50 ms – replacing trial-and-error simulation runs that may take minutes to hours. Ablation studies confirm that family-aware modeling provides the single largest performance improvement (+3.2 percentage points), validating the hypothesis that algorithm family is a first-class feature for simulation cost prediction.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What It Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

arXiv:2606.12442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Spectral Analysis of Molecular Features: When Richer Features Do Not Guarantee Better Generalization

arXiv:2510.14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality. While deep learning models are widely used for molecular property prediction, kernel methods remain competitive in low-data regimes, yet their spectral behavior is largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive spectral analysis of kernel ridge regression across diverse representations-including molecular fingerprints (ECFP), pretrained transformers, graph neural networks, and 3D descriptors-evaluated on QM9 and 3 MoleculeNet benchmarks. Surprisingly, richer spectral features do not consistently yield better generalization performance, contradicting common representation heuristics used in self-supervised learning (SSL). Across 4 spectral metrics, only ECFP-based kernels show a strictly positive correlation with performance. Transformer and global 3D representations exhibit mixed behavior, whereas local 3D representations show consistently negative correlations. Truncation analysis further emphasizes this disparity: for local 3D representations on thermodynamic targets, fewer than 2\% of eigenvalues (and occasionally as few as 0.02\%) are needed to recover 95\% of performance, whereas ECFP and transformer kernels require significantly more. By demonstrating a strong dependence on both task and representation, our results challenge the heuristic that richer spectra inherently improve generalization, providing new guidance for evaluating representations in SSL and in label-limited scientific tasks.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NTS-CoT: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-based News Timeline Summarization with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

The rapid updates of online news make tracking event developments challenging, highlighting the need for timeline summarization (TLS). Hallucinations, where LLM-generated content deviates from source news, still remain a critical issue in LLM-based TLS and are not well studied in existing works. To bridge this gap, we identify two primary types of hallucinations: unfaithful content during news summarization and information omission in date-event summarization. Then, we propose NTS-CoT, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to mitigate hallucinations in TLS. The framework consists of three key modules: i) Element-CoT to capture essential news elements for faithful summarization, ii) Date Selection to combine temporal saliency and event prominence for timestamp selection, and iii) Causal-CoT to infer causal relationships and reduce omissions in date-event summarization. Extensive experiments, including quantitative analysis on three TLS benchmarks and human evaluation, demonstrate that NTS-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving LLM-based TLS performance. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NTS-CoT .

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Compositional Framework for Open-ended Intelligence

arXiv:2606.15386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended intelligence is the capacity to adapt to novel problems and environments that are substantially different from those in training. We formalize open-ended intelligence as the closure induced by a finite primitive set \(P\) and a set of composition operators \(C\). We characterize properties of the induced closure \(\mathcal{L}(P,C)\) that support unbounded compositional generation across families of tasks and worlds. A mathematics of open-ended intelligence requires two pillars: a minimal set of representational primitives (e.g., states, actions) and algorithmic primitives (e.g., nearest neighbor), together with composition motifs (e.g., recursion, sequencing) that reflect an acquired compositional grammar. The closure of these two pillars enables the generation of infinite adaptive responses across a wide range of settings. The mathematics supports complementary research agendas, including evaluation metrics for explanation and interpretability, as well as building architectures where compositional generalization is native. We propose next primitive prediction as a novel architectural objective, where the training objective encourages the acquisition of reusable algorithmic primitives and their compositional grammar, such that new solutions are generated through recombination. Curriculum learning and self-play enable lifelong learning and expansion of the closure by discovering reusable primitives and transition motifs across families of tasks and worlds. We ground the framework through case studies in physics, evolution, and neuroscience.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Veriphi: Attack-Guided Neural Network Verification with Dataset-Dependent Training Methods

arXiv:2606.18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Veriphi, a GPU-accelerated neural network verification system that combines fast adversarial attacks with formal bound certification using alpha,beta-CROWN methods. Through systematic experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 using three training methodologies (standard, adversarial, certified), we demonstrate that training method effectiveness is fundamentally dataset-dependent. Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) achieves 78% certified accuracy on simple MNIST (784 dimensions) but provides negligible certification performance on the more complex CIFAR-10 dataset, where PGD adversarial training dominates with 94% certification at small perturbations. We achieve 5x verification speedup through attack-guided falsification and scale our approach to production-size models (105.8M parameters) for real-world aerospace logistics optimization. Our results challenge the assumption that certified training universally outperforms adversarial training, showing context matters critically for verification strategy selection.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

DRIVE: Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation

arXiv:2606.14192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Auto-bidding is a core component of real-time advertising systems, where decisions must optimize long-term performance under budget and cost constraints, while online exploration is prohibitively risky. Offline reinforcement learning and, more recently, Transformer-based sequence modeling have shown promise for learning bidding policies from logged data, but their unimodal and purely parametric formulations often collapse multiple effective bidding strategies into suboptimal averaged actions and perform unreliably under sparse or long-tail traffic. To mitigate these limitations, we propose DRIVE (Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation), a unified Transformer-based framework that decouples candidate action generation from decision making for offline auto-bidding. DRIVE combines distributional action modeling, retrieval-augmented candidate generation from high-quality historical decisions, and value-based evaluation to select the most promising bid at inference time. Extensive experiments on AuctionNet and additional offline reinforcement learning benchmarks demonstrate that DRIVE consistently improves bidding performance and generalizes well across multiple Transformer-based methods.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Random Schrödinger operators on manifolds and abstract bounds for multiplier-type operators

arXiv:2606.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study random Schrödinger operators on closed Riemannian manifolds with Anderson-type potentials. We prove high-probability spectral inclusion bounds showing that eigenvalues remain close to those of the Laplacian, with deviations controlled by a norm of the potential coefficients. Compared with deterministic bounds, this yields a square-root cancellation gain. The proof is based on a general principle showing that randomisation improves operator norm bounds for multiplier-type operators, which we formulate in both discrete and continuous settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PIGEON: VLM-Driven Object Navigation via Points of Interest Selection

Object navigation in unseen indoor environments requires agents to perform semantic search under partial observability. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide strong semantic-spatial priors for this task, but how to interface them with robot navigation remains challenging: dense VLM inference is expensive, while abstracting environments into symbolic memories often separates high-level reasoning from the raw visual evidence that supports it. We propose we propose PIGEON (Point of Interest Guided Exploration for Object Navigation), a VLM-driven framework that formulates object navigation as raw-observation-grounded sparse decision problem. PIGEON introduces Points of Interest (PoIs) as sparse visual decision units that couple geometrically executable waypoints with raw egocentric observations. Rather than using VLMs as dense controllers or restricting them to frontier ranking, PIGEON enables VLMs to select among task-critical PoIs, including exploration frontiers, suspected target objects, traversable stairs, and floor-level summaries, while low-level planners execute continuous motion between them. This PoI interface further makes high-level navigation decisions verifiable, allowing us to develop an RLVR pipeline that improves local VLMs without manual Chain-of-Thought annotations. Extensive experiments on Habitat ObjectNav benchmarks show that PIGEON achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, scales consistently with foundation model capacity, and transfers to Active Embodied Question Answering with only prompt modifications. Real-world deployments on physical robots further demonstrate its robustness and efficiency.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

PhysVLA: Towards Physically-Grounded VLA for Embodied Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at mapping visual inputs and natural language instructions directly to robotic control policies. However, because they are trained primarily to fit behavioural demonstration data, they do not explicitly enforce fundamental physical principles such as rigid-body dynamics or contact constraints. This exposes a critical physics gap: standard temporal smoothing applied on top of single-step or chunked VLAs trades trajectory quality for added failures that short-term memory cannot resolve. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysVLA (Physics-VLA), a plug-and-play, inference-time framework designed to wrap any frozen VLA backbone without retraining, fine-tuning, or weight access, with less than 1 ms of overhead per control step. PhysVLA intercepts the predicted control action, captures only the simulator or system state, and applies a dual-layered correction: (i) a phase-aware finite-state machine that structures discrete task segments (approach, grasp, transport, and place), and (ii) a selective Euler-Lagrange gate that activates only when a dynamics oracle detects kinodynamic inconsistency. Evaluated across OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT, Force-VLA, and Generalist-VLA on LIBERO-Spatial with a 7-DoF Franka Panda, the framework delivers absolute success rate increases of up to 17% and stability increases of up to 19% with no per-task regressions, improves trajectory efficiency by up to 15% across all four backbones, and shows up to a 10x improvement in trajectory jerk robustness on a Robosuite Lift cross-simulator sweep. We further validate the framework on a real Agilex Piper arm with a pick-and-place task, confirming that PhysVLA transfers to physical hardware without retraining, with success-rate improvements of up to 50%, establishing physical awareness as a composable, backbone-agnostic runtime module.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Physics-Inspired Optimizer: Velocity Regularized Adam

arXiv:2505.13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous algorithms, including the ubiquitous Adam, operate at the so-called adaptive edge of stability regime during training, leading to rapid oscillations and slowed convergence of loss. However, VRAdam adds a higher order penalty on the learning rate based on the velocity such that the algorithm automatically slows down whenever weight updates become large. In practice, we observe that the effective dynamic learning rate shrinks in high-velocity regimes, and damping oscillations. By combining this velocity-based regularizer for global damping with per-parameter scaling of Adam, we create a powerful hybrid optimizer. For this optimizer, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis of operation at the edge of stability from a physical and control perspective for the momentum. Furthermore, we derive convergence bounds with the rate $\mathcal{O}(\ln(N)/\sqrt{N})$ for a stochastic non convex objective under mild assumptions. We demonstrate that VRAdam exceeds the performance against standard optimizers including AdamW. We benchmark various tasks such as image classification, language modeling, and generative modeling using diverse architectures and training methodologies including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformers, and GFlowNets.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

arXiv:2603.26039v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.